September 2005 saw the worldwide release of One Upon A Little Time, the new album from John Parish.
It's an epic & intimate record. It talks about the heroic struggle of everyday life. It talks nonsense. Its a stand against the myth of choice. Its a grownup record for people who loathe music for grown-ups.
John's previous album How Animals Move was released on Thrill Jockey Records in 2002. It received huge critical acclaim and when the final show of the world tour took place in May 2003 at the Primavera Festival in Barcelona, Parish started thinking about his next record. He wanted to do something different. Something intimate, intense, sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly. Chance & circumstance were largely responsible in finding the right people to help him realise this.
In 2003 Parish made his first Italian record, travelling to Catania in Sicily to produce Cesare Basiles (Gran Calavera Elettrica). "I immediately related to the place, and the way of working down there. The casualness , people dropping by the studio for a glass of wine, some olives, maybe play a little guitar or something,. The opposite to that sterile studio situation you often get where everything is under control & as a result it's kind of impossible to do anything genuinely inspirational", said Parish. While in Catania , Parish met a range of interesting musicians, including Marta Collica. He liked her voice & her unique keyboard style, stumbling unpredictably between delicacy and distortion.
Several months later, in January 2004, Parish travelled to Rome to produce an album (Tutto Lamore Che Mi Manca) for Nada, the Italian Marianne Faithfull. Growing more attached to the Italian music scene with each new introduction, Parish built a relationship with bass player Giorgia Poli and engineer Marco Tagliola.
Jean-Marc Butty, who lives in Paris and played with Parish in To Bring You My Love-era PJ Harvey, was chosen to play drums.
Once Upon A Little Time was recorded by Marco Tagliola over four sessions in the second half of last year. The first two sessions took place at Marco's Perpetuum Mobile studio in Nave, Italy . The third and fourth sessions were at Toybox in Bristol and Sun Studios in Copenhagen, respectively.
Some friends including Adrian Utley (Portishead), Jeremy Hogg (PJ Harvey) and Hugo Race (Bad Seeds, Sepiatone) dropped in to add their own personal touch to the record, but Once Upon A Little Time is really a band record. The core group of John Parish, Marta Collica, Giorgia Poli and Jean-Marc Butty developed a musical vocabulary and conversational tone that only a band can have. Most of the tracks were cut live in the studio & you can hear the trust the four have in each other as they waver between intense emotional fragility, choice & recklessness.
Apart from Kevin Hunter's Somebody Else, all the songs on Once Upon A Little Time are Parish compositions.
Water Road is an arrangement of a piece John originally wrote for American director Jennifer Houlton's film Water. Glade Park was written when John visited the titular Colorado National Monument . He was told it was beautiful, though he wasn't able to see it because on the first day Parish contracted a serious bacterial infection in his left eye. He narrowly escaped losing it altogether and had to stay there a week while it was treated. "I couldnt stand any light, so I could only go outside in the middle of the night, crunching around on the snow with really blurry vision. It was like being on another planet. Oddly enjoyable".
Once Upon A Little Time is a title inspired by John Parish's youngest daughter, Hopey. Hopey used to begin all of her stories with this phrase and it resonated in Parish's mind as he liked the combination of the epic and intimate. (It should be noted that aside from inspiring the title, Hopey also makes her recorded debut on this album. She wandered into the studio while Parish was recording a vocal and started playing the organ. It sounded good, so Parish stopped singing, held the mic over the organ speaker and left the tape running.)
Once Upon A Little Time is out now through Thrill Jockey. In the interim, John has continued production work on a number of projects (see blog) and has recently finished the new, as yet untitled, John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey album.
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